Your opinion is important.

Steve Brown:
Your opinion is important. Let’s talk about it on this edition of Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
Key Life is a radio program for struggling believers, sick of phony religion and pious clichés. Our host and teacher is seminary professor Steve Brown. He teaches that radical freedom leads to infectious joy and surprising faithfulness.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. If you’re just joining us, we’re talking about a church meeting. And a very important church meeting. And along the way, we’ve been talking about the church and how important the church is. And we’re looking at what happened at this church meeting, which changed the world. And by looking at that and applying it today, we’re able to understand some things that are important about God and Jesus, our passion, our mission, and how one goes about it. And if you were listening yesterday, we saw how important arbitration is. It’s verses three through four in the 15th chapter of Acts. Now we’ve seen, you’ve got to expect that there’s going to be dissension. If they had it in the early church, then it’s going to be in the modern church. So expect expect it, don’t be shocked by it. When you get Christians together, what’s that old joke that somebody tells about a man who was marooned on an island for years. And they finally found that he was there and they sent a ship to pick him up. And, as they were leaving the island where he’d lived all these years, there were two buildings and the man who was driving the boat said to the man who had been marooned all of those years, what’s that first building. He said, oh, that’s my church. And then he said, what’s the second building. And he said, oh, I left that first church, cause I didn’t like it. And that’s the second church, one guy, nobody to fight with, and he was anyway. So expect dissension in the church. And, we’re looking at the things and the ways, the things they did and the ways they dealt with it. And we saw yesterday that arbitration was important. That’s why a church meeting is important. That’s why it’s important that we talk. That’s why it’s important that we get together and resolve matters among the people of God, before we present the gospel to those who are not the people of God. Then secondly, I want you to see the necessity of everybody being heard. In the fifth verse, it starts, but if you get down to the 12th verse.

And all the assembly kept silence, and they listened to Barnabas and Paul, as they related what signs and wonders God had done through them to the Gentiles.

Now this all started with people who disagreed with what had happened among the Gentiles. And they also were given a place to speak their mind in the church meeting. It’s important that we recognize that everybody’s opinion is valuable. I served in the church once and in our form of government, we have elders and I’d been there for two years and one of the elders had never spoken a word. And so, finally, after an elders meeting, one night, I said, come into my study Jim, I want to talk to you about something. And he came in and sat down and I said, I love you. And you know that I love you, after I’ve been here a couple of years, and so I feel free to say something to you, you’re a leader of the church and you never speak a word. And he said that’s because when I speak a word, nobody listens. And I said, I am so very sorry. And you need to know that starting at the next elders’ meeting, that will change. And it did. Every elders immediately I conducted for the rest of my ministry. And that was a lot of a years. I made a point at some time during the meeting, to ask every person who sat at the table, every elder, what do you think about that? What do you say? How do you feel about that? Don’t just sit there cause then you’ll leave here and complain with the decisions we’ve made. So speak up, right now, and tell me what you think. We need to do that in the church all the time because everybody who is there has an opinion. And that opinion is valuable, not just the ones who have money, not just the ones who have prestige, not just the ones who have been Christians for a long time, not just the ones who have been ordained, not just the ones who have been to seminary, everybody in the church needs to feel that they are heard and that they are valued in the opinion that they give. I’m going to say something that I’ve always found interesting. It started one time when I was with Addison Leitch, who was the Dean at Gordon-Conwell Seminary. And, we were at a conference together and Addison was approached by a student and the student said, asked him some questions about end times and eschatology. And, Dr. Leach said, I’m not sure about that, but I think at some point somebody’s going to come up with the answer and we’re all going to say, that’s it, I never realized that. And that person, Dr. Leach said, won’t be a preacher or a scholar. It’ll probably be somebody you’ve never heard of who cooks the meals in the church. And when he said that, I thought about it and I started looking and it was amazing where I found pearls wisdom in the church, coming from unexpected places. Why is that? Because that’s why and how God created the church. You think about that. Amen.

Matthew Porter:
Thanks Steve. So many good insights for us to soak up here in Acts 15, and we will resume that tomorrow. Do join us then. Well, as you know, the church is changing. We see it changing even in the early days as recorded here in Acts. And we also know that God has called us to put new wine into new wineskins. Yeah. Okay, right, but what does that mean exactly? Well, Steve spoke about that in a sermon called The Sound of Exploding wineskins. Take a listen to part of that sermon, then I’ll be back to tell you about a special free offer. Here’s Steve.

Steve Brown:
It wasn’t miracles, every miracle he ever did had been done by others. What was it? There was something new about the new wine that was so new and so fresh that it would sweep the entire world and change everybody it touched. So, what is the wine? Jesus here says, if you put new wine and I assume that’s him, and I assume that us, and old wine skins, they’re going to explode. What is the wine? What was so new? You can handle this in a lot of ways. You can talk about people that don’t have any wine or any wineskins, they’re atheists and agnostics. We ought to have compassion and pity for them. We could talk about, people who have old wine and old wineskins, they’re asleep, we should wake them up. We could talk about people who have new wine and old wineskins, and they’re messed up with wine all over the place. We can clean them up, but Jesus said new wine, new wine. What is that wine? What was he, what was it, that was so new, that you had to create new form. What was so, it wasn’t what he taught, everything he taught was taught in the Old Testament. He was Jewish, wasn’t that, wasn’t miracles, every miracle he ever did had been done by others. What was it? There was something new about the new wine that was so new and so fresh that it would sweep the entire world and change everybody it touched. So, I move the previous question. What’s the old wine? Well, if you look into this text, the first thing that you note immediately is that the new wine smells messy. It has to do with sin, now I’m not a connoisseur in this. If you do what I do, you’ll get your choice of smoking or cussing or drinking, and I’ve already chosen two, and can’t afford the third. So, I’m a teetotaler. I, if I ever preached drunk, no telling what, you think I’m offensive now, you have no idea. So, I don’t drink wine. It tastes like Kool-Aid gone bad to me. But as I understand it, from people who know, new wine is the worst wine, it tastes like Ripple. And old wine is a good wine. So, whatever Jesus was saying here, it wasn’t necessarily a good thing about us. And then if you will, look at the 12th verse here.

But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.

I’m glad for that.

Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but to call sinners.”

Aren’t you glad? That’s what the new wine is about. It’s messy. It smells. It doesn’t, as someone said said.

We are beggars telling other beggars where we found bread.

I agree with that, but I would expand it from that. We are confused beggars, present beggars, messed up, screwed up beggars, beggars who don’t do it right and don’t know how to do it right, sinful beggars, lost beggars, confused beggars, and the only thing we know is where we found the bread. That’s what we’re about. So, the new wine and that’s us, has to do with messy, with sin, with things that don’t work.

Matthew Porter:
Such a timely message and you can get a free copy of that full sermon on CD by calling us right now at 1-800-KEY-LIFE. That’s 1-800-539-5433. You can also e-mail [email protected] to ask for that CD. If you would like to mail your request, send it to

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